ABSTRACT
For his central observer or 'reverberator' in this new novel Mr. Faulkner has chosen a character that is like a grotesque caricature of the typical hero of the post-war generation of poets and novelists. From one of the chapter-headings, Lovesong of]. A. Prufrock, it is apparent that Mr. Faulkner himself would have us make some such ironic connection. The unnamed reporter in the story is the bedraggled heir of the pallid Laforguian celibate of the early Eliot, the masochistic intellectuals of Aldous Huxley, and the sterile aficionados of Ernest Hemingway. The outward and visible sign of his impotence is his almost ghostly physical fragility: 'a scarecrow in a winter field,' 'a paper sack ofempty beer bottles in the street,' 'a dandelion burr moving where there is no wind.' From such comparisons it should also be plain that he is being made to serve as the whipping boy for Mr. Faulkner's whole generation. He is, or has been, the image which that generation has found staring back at itself every morning in the mirror. And the mirror must somehow and in some way be broken.
